Just a few more days to go until the annual summer fest is upon us. Plenty of cricket, camaraderie, food and drink and the opportunity to just lay off or to go fishing out on the ocean away from the trials and tribulations of daily life.

Two whole days for most and even four for the more fortunate – no wonder we look forward to it.

Before returning to less sensational piscatorial items, it is time for a final wrap-up of the July billfish mania season. Noteworthy and important to Bermuda, both in terms of publicity but also with financial ramifications that affect both local businesses and individuals.

The final event of the Bermuda Triple Crown was the Sea Horse Anglers Club Billfish Tournament. This event drew 28 teams comprised of 270 anglers. The event was a great success, catching 59 billfish: 45 blue marlin, 13 white marlin and one spearfish, a bit of a rarity locally.

Each day brought some excitement with a large fish being weighed in. On the first day of the tournament, local boat Triple Play, skippered by Capt. Sloan Wakefield brought in a fine 749-pound blue marlin to claim the day's honours.

Things got a bit more hectic on the second day when Captain Mathew Mauldwin's visiting boat Clicking Through came to the Barr's Bay weigh station with a nice blue that tipped the scales at 666 pounds.

Just when it looked like it was all over bar the shouting, on the third and final day of the tournament, Capt. Bigger James Robinson's Wound Up set all the opposition aside with an 858-pound blue marlin which easily claimed the prestige that goes with the tournament's largest fish.

Inasmuch as this tournament, like the other major events is a modified release tournament, the most points came from blue marlin releases. Heading up the honours as Tournament High Point Boat in first place was Captain Eric Solderholm's Sea'duce which amassed a total of 2,500 points from five blue marlin releases. In second place, with 2,000 points was Capt. Albert Miller's Freedom, while Click Through finished third with 1,766 points, narrowly ahead of fourth place Triple Play with 1,749 points.

Top angler was Ken Winton on Wound Up with 1,358 points ahead of Leslie Spanswick on Pink Impression (1,200 points). The High Point Game Fish was a 36.8-pound wahoo caught aboard Paradise One.

The winning team in the Bermuda Triple Crown was Click Through with a total of 4,466 points from three events with the early leader, Que Mas in second with 4,300 points, narrowly beating out Sea'duce which had 4,200 points.

Statistics fans will be interested to know that the three eligible events fished here in July caught a total of 188 billfish: 139 blues, 48 whites and a lone spearfish. With a total of eight days fishing involved, this works out at 23.5 billfish per day. Unfortunately this is relatively meaningless, because the number of boats varied for each event and, in order to be of any value, the stats have to be reworked to make them more specific.

For the Bermuda Billfish Blast (two-day tournament, 39 boats), the numbers work out at 0.55 billfish per boat per day. More specifically, it was 0.36 blue marlin per boat per day and 0.19 white marlin per boat per day.

In the Bermuda Big Game Classic (three-day tournament, 49 boats fishing), the figures are a bit better with 0.59 billfish per boat per day. In terms of by species, it was 0.45 blue marlin per boat per day and 0.14 white marlin per boat per day.

It was the Sea Horse Anglers event that had the best overall figure with 0.70 billfish per boat per day. It was 0.54 blue marlin per boat per day and 0.15 white marlin per boat per day. In terms of blue marlin the event was better than the Classic and considerably better than the Blast.

In comparison with events elsewhere, the class of the local fish is the draw rather than the sheer numbers. Tournaments like the Virgin Islands "Boy Scout" are more likely to have catches in the 0.75 fish per boat per day range with almost all the fish being blue marlin given the abundance of the species in those waters. The average fish is more likely to be in the 250-pound range and even with a minimum eligible weigh of just 400 pounds; fish are seldom brought to the dock. Quality over quantity, it is your call and given the number of foreign boats that almost routinely make the pilgrimage here, one must suspect that it is the former.

To further this suggestion, even though the tournaments are over and some of the visitors have departed our shores, others continue to work the blue briny around us to some success. On Wednesday just gone, the visiting boat C-YA, skippered by Capt. Rene Bonneval, caught and weighed yet another Bermuda grander, this one weighing in at 1005 pounds. And while the effort is in serious drop-off mode, there will continue to be some big fish out there. In fact, boats, both local and foreign, have reported a number of huge fish that have been raised and which, to all intents and purposes, are still at large out there somewhere. The cynics would say that they are simply waiting for some casual angler to leave a 30-lb rig out while crossing the deep; doubtless this will need replenishing much to the delight of local tackle suppliers.

But for many, fishing is less about catching and releasing sea monsters and more about catching something for the table and maybe the freezer. For most this translates into chumming along Bermuda's Edge or on the Banks. For smaller boaters it is now well into snapper season with white-water (wrongly silk snappers) or lane snappers pleasing in the channel areas. Not much in the size department but with very nice fillets, it is often very easy to catch the legal limit within an hour or so.

Those finding a good tide (off the stern and with the wind) should be rewarded over the reef areas and nearer the edge with yellowtail snappers, another prime eating fish. There are some really large (yes, there are world record classes for this species with the current all-tackle at 11.0 pounds!) yellowtails on the crown of Challenger Bank but there are also some really large tiger sharks there to.

Doubters will have been silenced by the recent documentation of a 350-pound plus tiger that figured in last week's Robinson's Marina tournament. They do come bigger than that and are best left to their own devices. For various happy reasons, shark fishing has never enjoyed much attention here in Bermuda and although there are plenty of shark tales from all over the globe, the fact of the matter is that they are threatened worldwide and they do serve a purpose. Sticking to monofilament leaders when chumming or drifting pretty much guarantees that it won't be one of those critters that supplies you with Tight lines!!!